When I taught school, it was part of my first-day routine to ask my students if any of them liked history. The complete lack of raised hands taught me that there was no point in asking. I was working at a private boarding school with students from all over the country, and not even one of them liked history or was at least willing to admit it.

If you had asked me in high school, I would not have raised my hand either. I was in college when I discovered my love of history. What changed? The presentation.

When it comes to middle and high school history, there is an emphasis on rote memorization and the regurgitation of facts. I understand why. Teachers have a set of standards they are supposed to achieve and not a lot of time to reach them. To accomplish these goals, teachers must omit chunks of history like the entire Gilded Age. (According to state standards, nobody needs to know about the Gilded Age — unless you end up managing the Chateau de Mores.) The syllabus for my world history class included the impressive statement that we would cover 40,000 years of history in 36 weeks. This was like taking a 700-page book and adapting it to a 90-minute film. At best, you are only scratching the surface of the story.

History is a social science, or as I would tell my students, it is a skill set. It is about looking at sources and developing your interpretation about what happened. When you focus on the skills and the analysis rather than striving to check items off a list, then you can dive into the parts of history that are fascinating, mind-blowing, or odd. The elements of history that make the topic fun. If you have ever seen a student’s reaction to learning that England and Spain went to war over an ear, then you know what I mean.

State historic sites can have the same presentation problem. There is not enough time to cram in all the fascinating information that staff have spent countless hours researching into a short visit. Staff can suffer from a mindset that we have to tell you everything, or we are not doing our jobs. While lots of accurate information, facts, and stories will fascinate some visitors, for others, too much information is not a compelling experience.

Who do you think is more likely to go to a museum, young adults or senior citizens? The answer seems obvious, and most would assume that museums are for the older generation and don’t fit the lifestyle of the tech-savvy younger generations. But according to a 2018 study conducted by Wilkening Consulting, young adults are 50 percent more likely to visit a museum than older adults.¹ There are several reasons for this, but a leading reason is that they visited a museum or site as a kid and had a memorable experience.

Part of my job as state historic sites manager is trying to figure out what makes a memorable experience. It is a difficult task as there is no magic formula. There are a multitude of ways that people experience a site. From the moment a visitor pulls into a site, they are already experiencing it. Some issues are easy to address, such as making sure that the site is well maintained and that the staff is friendly and knowledgeable. The tricky part is when you try to take it to the next level. Our Hands-on History program is adding opportunities for visitors to touch, try, experiment, and play with historical items, clothes, and games. We are also looking at new technology such as augmented reality and smart speakers and how we can leverage that technology to create new and exciting ways to interact with our sites and exhibits.

And sometimes it is just about finding what makes a site cool. My nephew got to visit the Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile State Historic Site with me as part of the 10th anniversary as a state historic site this summer. After getting to go 50 feet underground and seeing the art on the walls, he insisted on buying a t-shirt, and wore it almost every day he was at the family lake cabin and on the first day of school. Why? So that people would ask him about it, and he could share the story of his memorable experience.

Archaeologists have been seeking higher vantage points to photograph and map archaeological sites for decades. Cameras mounted under balloons or kites, cameras in aircraft or powered parachutes, or photos taken from ladders, mechanical lifts, or even a slight hill — archaeologists have used them all at one time or another to gain an aerial perspective and document site excavations.

Some early methods of photography used by archaeologists were not for the faint of heart. A fully extended ladder stabilized by wires was used to photograph excavations at the Oldham site located in Charles Mix County, South Dakota. (River Basin Survey photograph 39CH7-405).

Stanley Ahler of the PaleoCultural Research Group and Lloyd Jensen of the State Historical Society of North Dakota use an articulating boom lift to photograph excavations at Menoken Indian Village State Historic Site in August 2005. (Note: Both men were wearing a protective safety harness.)

A relatively new method of mapping features at archaeological sites is drone mapping. Since 2017, I’ve written about flying the State Historical Society’s quadcopter (or “drone”) to photograph state historic sites multiple times. Most recently, I’ve written about using our drone to photograph Cannonball Stage Stop and Fort Mandan Overlook State Historic Sites.

Fort Mandan Overlook offers a great example of using a drone to generate a highly detailed surface map of features (such as house depressions, fortifications ditches, or topography) present on an archaeological site. The aerial images are processed using specialized software. State Historical Society archaeologists drone mapped the Fort Mandan Overlook site on July 25, 2019.

Aerial image of Fort Mandan Overlook State Historic Site in McLean County, North Dakota, taken by quadcopter on July 25, 2019. The fortification ditch visible in this image was a defensive structure constructed sometime in the late-18th to mid-19th century. The site was initially occupied as early as the 1300s. The site overlooks the former location of Lewis and Clark’s Fort Mandan, which was washed away by the Missouri River soon after the expedition passed through the area.

To prepare for a drone mapping mission, State Historical Society archaeologists established a series of “ground control points” at the site using a centimeter-level accuracy Global Positioning System (GPS) unit and ground targets. The targets help to accurately align the images captured by the drone and supplement the GPS coordinates tagged to each of the images.

Six of these targets were placed on the ground surface at the site, and centimeter-precise GPS coordinates were collected prior to mapping.

Prior to flying the drone at the site, a detailed “mission plan” was created using Pix4D capture, a software specifically designed for drone mapping. The mission plan directed the drone to fly in a grid pattern over the site area at a specific altitude and collect images of the ground surface that would be mosaicked or “stitched” together later. The resulting 356 images are at a very high resolution, and each image has extremely detailed locational information associated with it.

An image of the Pix4D Capture software during our “mission” at Fort Mandan Overlook. An aerial image of the area serves as a basemap. The mission grid is visible, and the green dots indicate the position of collected images.

One of the 356 images collected by the drone at Fort Mandan Overlook. This image is in the southeast corner of the site. The original image was also tagged with GPS coordinates.

After the grid mission was flown, the images collected were processed using photogrammetry software called Agisoft Metashape. Photogrammetry is the process of obtaining information about objects or the environment by analyzing and interpreting photographic images. The software corrects the inherent distortion introduced when we photograph three-dimensional objects (like artifacts or the ground surface), and then displays the images on a flat surface (like a computer monitor or a printed page).

In this case, the images used in an analysis of the surface of the Fort Mandan Overlook site were those collected by our drone. Photogrammetric image analysis is an area of research the State Historical Society’s Chief Archaeologist Andy Clark is quite familiar with, and he processed the 356 overlapping images collected using this specialized software to produce measurably accurate three-dimensional models and photographs. I’ve included a couple brief descriptions below.

An image from the photogrammetric software used to process images collected at Fort Mandan Overlook. The blue rectangles at top indicate the relative positions of the images collected by the drone. The three-dimensional image below is the result of “stitching” the images into a mosaic using a pixel-matching algorithm. The individual images collected by the drone are seen at the bottom of this screenshot.

A digital surface model (DSM) of Fort Mandan Overlook. DSMs contain elevation data of the terrain and other features present on the surface (like trees and structures). In this image, the red, orange, and yellow colors represent lower elevations at the site, so the bluff edge at the site can clearly be identified.

Image showing a relief map of Fort Mandan Overlook. A relief map is a 3-D representation of a surface, with the Sun’s position indicated. Relief maps tend to look realistic and can be useful in interpreting a three-dimensional surface. The fortification ditch and drainages present at the site are clearly visible in this image.

An orthophotograph showing Fort Mandan Overlook. Orthophotographs are aerial images that have been geometrically corrected to minimize distortion so that scale is uniform and features are measurable. Distances and area can be accurately measured using orthophotographs.

State Historical Society archaeologists have “drone mapped” five archaeological sites in this manner so far. While my focus has been primarily on using the drone to document and map archaeological sites, some of my coworkers have begun using similar techniques to model artifacts like stone tools, pottery, and even historic clothing. Keep an eye out for new 3-D projects described in future blog entries!